Paris: Casual Eats Part I

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 11, 2009]

Guys, what are you doing to that pig?

No messing around here with happy little pigs lining up to have their trotters removed. "To the foot of the pig!" is the toast.

And glasses must have been raised often enough over the last sixty years at this Les Halles survivor.  At least the pigs at the website look more cheerful.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

On my last trip to Paris, in fall of 2006, the dining focus was on good, mid-priced bistros, traditional (Machon d'Henri) and modern (Chez Michel).  That was before At the Sign of the Pink Pig creaked into action.  This time around, I was set on marking a certain point in life by dining at L'Ambroisie and a few other restaurants floating in the Michelin three-star stratosphere.  The pay-off was that in-between eating was at the very casual end, for the sake of both digestion and budget.  That suits me quite well, because the first thing I want when I arrive in France is tripe.

Well, no, that's not quite the first thing.  After a shower and a nap to recover from the overnight flight, the first thing one needs is a pastis.  I rarely drink Ricard, Pernod, or any of the other brands when I am not in France (absinthe, which has burst onto New York cocktail lists over the last couple of years, is a different kettle of wormwood).  It is a matter of acclimatization.  Few tastes have such a strong sense of place for me.  I took the first glass at a friendly (and at weekends, much too busy) bar in the Marais, L'Etoile Manquante.  Complimentary canapés arrived -smoked salmon, ham, dry sausage on small pieces of good, pain bio-style bread.

I had no dinner plans, but remembered a nearby restaurant on the same street, Rue Vieille du Temple, called Les Philosophes. It had always seemed popular. And indeed it still is, the warm main dining room comfortably full when I showed up. Fortunately, much the same food is served in a casual saloon section just around the corner called La Chaise au Plafond.

Ordering from the blackboard, I started with another nostalgic taste, simple jambon de pays - not as refined and velvety as the good Italian and Spanish hams, but certainly the first uncooked ham I ever ate, many years ago.  Following this, I succumbed to the tripe craving with one big fat andouillette.  Now, strictly speaking, the main component of this fine sausage is smoked chitterlings - the intestine rather than the stomach lining - but I think most would agree that it's a close relation of a tripe dish.  The exterior of the sausage should be charred, the interior juicy and...well, I say tangy, but I know there are other words for it.  It's strong meat.  Served, of course with some salad and a heap of frites, and I ordered Saumur-Champigny by the glass.

Next morning, after hitting the Kandinsky exhibition already reviewed, I explored the stretch of Rue Rambuteau east of the Beaubourg Center.  Happily,  the block on which my apartment was located was crammed almost exclusively with food and drink vendors.  Three or four different traiteurs, including Vietnamese; my favorite was a small stall boasting produce of the Auvergne, with heaps of savory pastries in the window.  There were cafés at each corner of the street, an Italian and a Chinese restaurant, a bistro, wine stores and a wine bar, and a grocery with mounds of new season strawberries and asparagus on display. Needing to reconfirm my love of tripe, I found a window seat in Le Station, one of the corner bars, and ordered tripoux.

These are small packets of tripe, usually stuffed with foot-meat, and here they were presented tastily but inconveniently in a deep soup bowl. You need a bigger mouth than me to swallow tripoux whole, so I started fishing them out of the sticky, oniony broth and dismembering them on the bread plate.  Very nice.  As usual, steady home-style cooking is available in ordinary cafés like this at anything from eight to fourteen euros a plate.  I could have eaten lunch in this place for a week, working my way through the duck confit, the meat-heavy Auverngat salad and the spring chicken.

Doing battle with the Louvre on Friday morning left me very hungry for Friday lunch.  Just as well.   Au Pied de Cochon, which seems to serve pretty well around the clock, is a hangover from

the old Les Halles, when pre-dawn feasts of onion soup and pig's feet in market restaurants were a Parisian tradition.  The interior is spectacularly old-school, a 1946 version of la belle époque, all paintings and statues and mirrors and staircases leading to upper floor dining rooms. Tables are close packed, and I was seated on a plummy banquette next to a couple of guys whose intake reassured me that the days of the gourmand are not yet dead.

They had finishedtheir appetizers and were being served a pig's trotter and a War and Peace-sized bloody steak.  They followed these titbits with pillowy rhum babas, and polished off a couple of bottles of wine.  Friday lunch.  Nervously, I managed a dozen decent oysters before taking the trotter - a meat extremity, finished in the pan, garnished with a pound or two of fried potatoes and served with a pitcher of béarnaise sauce.  You can get it stuffed with foie gras if you're really peckish.  I skipped the donuts.

I had a desire to re-visit this shameless slice of tradition, because the menu is large, and goes beyond pig's feet to a long list of grilled meats, but I didn't find time on this trip.

I wasn't sure I'd ever be hungry again, but late that night, after drinks with a friend near the Arc de Triomphe, I found myself back in the Marais again with no plans and needing supper.  Crise or no crise, any good restaurant is full at ten on a Friday evening, so there was some frustrating pavement-pounding until I gave up and took supper in an ordinary bistro on Rue Rambuteau known as "The Bulldog."  The confit de canard was unremarkable, but I enjoyed the "salad" of boudin noir which preceded it - hunks of blood sausage and fried apple, and scarcely a green leaf in sight.

Something rather nicer on Saturday evening.  Au Bourgignon du Marais, on one of the neighborhood's quieter streets, Rue François-Miron, has been on my list for a few years now.  It has a good reputation for regional food and a cellar full of Burgundy.  Showing up with no reservation, I played the game of pretending tables were not obviously available, cooling my heels for the requisite five or ten minutes before being seated on the terrace.   The evening had cooled and a light rain was falling, but the terrace heaters were powerful.

The list of specials cheered me up.  I started with a straightforwardly good slice of rabbit terrine, two big slices wrapped in tasty backfat, served some coarse salt and a pepper-grinder packed with a rainbow of multi-colored peppercorns.   The filet de boeuf aux morilles suffered a scarcity of the increasingly expensive mushroom, but was a lovely piece of meat.  Ordered rare, the blood from the center swirled pleasingly into the mushroom sauce which concealed small shards of morel.  Other mushrooms made a more prominent showing, and rather than skinny frites I was served a side of thick, crisp, well-salted wedges of potato (home fries, I suppose).

Although there's a deep selection of red Burgundy by the bottle, the list by the glass is comparatively short.  This turned out not to matter, as a 2003 Domaine Jablot 1er Cru Givry could not have been bettered as a match for the beef.  This was the kind of wine I drank when I was in Burgundy, saturated with the flavor of the region.  I had another with the cheese - from the same region, of course, Époisses of a moist freshness hard to find in New York. And to finish, another regional gem.  A 1976 marc de Bourgogne. 

My server was surprised and delighted that I ordered it, and I didn't begrudge fifteen euros.  Even with the exchange rate, that doesn't seem bad for a large pour of liquid gold.  The whole meal, 83E with several glasses of wine.  Recommended.

More next week...